In the last week, social platforms including Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr have announced improvements to their analytics offerings for brands that advertise on and use their platforms for marketing. Twitter has taken that move and raised it by opening up its analytics dashboard to all users with an active account, not just paying advertisers.

Available in four languages, the dashboard is "designed for the serious tweeter—the journalists, politicians, celebrities and everyone else who are trying to reach a large pool of people," the Wall Street Journal notes.

“Understanding why some of their tweets didn’t gain much traction could help users improve their performance, thus increasing engagement—an important metric that is closely tied to the way advertisers view Twitter as an attractive platform. This could be one of the reasons why Twitter decided to make a product previously designed for paying customers to the wider pool of users.”

The dashboard gives a broad view of the number of impressions a tweet has received, favorites, profile clicks, retweets and replies, and how many times users engaged with a tweet and what that engagement was.Continue reading...

With marketers pouring buckets of cash and resources into social media campaigns, everyone's wondering: Does it work?

Instagram is now offering a new three-pronged dashboard, the first suite of real-time, self-serve tools for marketers to manage their Instagram accounts and understand the impact of their campaigns.

The “ad insights” tool tracks performance via impressions, reach and engagement, while a second, “account insights,” delivers data on non-paid content posted. A third “ad staging” tool enables previews of creative before it goes live on Instagram.

"An advertiser will now have access to a real-time campaign summary and data showing how their target audience is responding to each of their sponsored photos," Instagram said in a blog post. "Also, brand marketers will be able to better understand the best time of day to post a photo or video."

While Instagram had previously been providing brands with reports about their campaigns, that data is now available directly to them.Continue reading...

But are the hours inside social media war rooms and millions of dollars spent all worth it for the dozens of official and unofficial brands playing off the World Cup? "Measuring the return on investment is a very real and contentious issue, as marketers are struggling to justify a solid return for the financial investment in social marketing, sponsorship and marketing in general," said Gordon Geldenhuys, head of online reputation management at 25AM, according to Biz2Community.

With some brands advertising across 180 countries, some are spending more on social campaigns for the World Cup than they do on Super Bowl TV ads, as Business Insider notes.Continue reading...

IKEA is pushing the edges of retailing innovation once again with an Instagram account that acts like a website.

Together with Moscow-based ad agency Instinct, the Swedish retailer built the IKEA PS 2014 account on Instagram to showcase 34 items in its latest designer collection, was created by 14 young designers to target a younger, urban, mobile-first crowd “always on the move.” The account has already garnered over 19,000 followers.

By clicking on a picture, users are redirected to an Instagram account dedicated to that piece of furniture. Tagging capabilities let users explore the main site, specific items and add photos of PS 2014 items tagged with the Instagram product name.Continue reading...

In a move that seems like Minority Report meets The Social Network, Facebook is giving back, to marketers that is, who are eager for more information to better target ads to the network’s 1.28 billion monthly users.

Now instead of just retargeting users, Facebook is turning the social platform into an open market for what it calls a "data-based democracy."

"Facebook has transformed from a company that disdained ads, to one that said it could figure out a better way to sell ads than everyone else, to one that sells ads just like everyone else, but with a lot more scale and data," Recode commented. "It makes a ton of money doing it.”

The company explained in a blog post that it primarily learns about interests "from the things you do on Facebook, such as Pages you like. Starting soon in the US, we will also include information from some of the websites and apps you use.”

To assuage fears of an imminent privacy assault, the company is also releasing a tool that provides users with information about why they are seeing a particular ad—which the network calls a value-add for being able to be better plugged-in to users' lives in the real world.Continue reading...

Chobani, in just six short years, established and rose to the top of the Greek yogurt category in North America. One of the strengths of the brand is its compelling and consistent tone of voice. Josh Dean, VP of brand communications, spoke about the brand’s voice at the recent Social Media Forum in New York. Where much of the discussion on brand voice revolves around what is being said and how it is being said, Dean’s talk raised an equally important but often overlooked factor to establishing brand voice—knowing when to speak.

To illustrate the importance of choosing authentic, on-brand moments to speak, Dean related an anecdote from his experience. As an official sponsor of the US Olympic team, Chobani prepared a shipment of yogurt to be delivered to the athletes in Sochi during the Winter Olympics this past February. The Russian government blocked the shipment as an outgrowth of years of importation disputes with the US over dairy products.

The ban caught fire in the media, both traditional and social, with everyone from Senator Charles Schumer to comedian Stephen Colbert weighing in on the controversy. Across social media, Chobani’s dedicated fans were particularly vocal, and a #FreeChobani hashtag took hold on Twitter. The coverage and conversation ultimately resulted in over 380 million overall impressions. However, one voice was notably missing from the conversation—Chobani.Continue reading...

Selfies: we've all taken one. In fact, so many people are snapping and sharing self portraits that the term was named Word of the Year in 2013 by the Oxford English Dictionary. Elevated by the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, whose Oscars selfie is the most-retweeted post ever, brands are now finding ways to cash in on the shameless snaps.

With over 55 percent of Millennials turning the camera on themselves, brands are seeing selfies as a great way to engage with consumers on social media and with new campaigns. Sephora, for instance, has encouraged users of its Beauty Board, a Pinterest-meets-Instagram social beauty site, to document their favorite looks with selfies and tag the images with product names.

Other brands taking advantage of the selfie craze include China's Huawei, which marketed its new Honor 3C smartphone as the "best phone for a selfie lover," and French Connection, which installed a photo booth in its Regent Street store in London for customers to snap selfie photos in the brand's clothes, which were then displayed in the store's windows.Continue reading...

In a world where cameras fall by the wayside for snap-happy smartphones, Instagram is proving that a picture is still worth a thousand words.

“When it comes to click-through rates on Facebook and Instagram, Instagram is annihilating Facebook in the contests of CTR and engagement," according to Business2Community.com.

For brands like Taco Bell and Hollister, Instagram campaigns have seen success among particular genders like never before. A favorite of young men, Taco Bell's month-long campaign helped boost followers by 45 percent with engagement rates up to 400 percent higher than organic posts, Adweekreports. “We felt like this was a great investment, one that complemented our overall media strategy," said Juliet Corsinita, Taco Bell's marketing VP and head of media.

Meanwhile, Hollister's teen girl-focused campaign saw similar success, setting the clothing brand up for an even bigger spending budget with the photo-sharing app through the summer.

As Instagram prepares to expand beyond its current 15-brand capacity thanks to its major deal with Omnicom, Jim Squires, director, market operations, assured Business Insider that the network won't be overrun thanks to strict rules imposed by the service. "We're being very methodical and deliberate," he said, "which is why you're not seeing a lot of ads in your feed."Continue reading...